I turned for Johns Farm and was halfway down the lane before I opened the envelope. I’d got six As, two Bs and a D in maths – even better than I’d expected. One of the As I’d got was for French. Félicitations à vous, Merise, I thought to myself, as the tears ran down my face. How would I let my daddy know that I’d done so well?

16

Summer turned quickly to autumn as August slipped away: green into orange and red. The Troubles rumbled on, a bomb here, a shooting there, all of it pushed to the back of our minds as Bridie and me picked fruit and made jam and got ready for the winter. The Tilley lamps with their delicate mantles humming made me so droopy when their paraffin wicks were lit I seemed to sleep for days on end. The bump got bigger; I worried it would be studded with lumps of sugar when it came out, I had eaten so many Paris buns. John never mentioned it, never looked at it or me unless he was cornered. I pulled all my limbs in and away every time he walked too close, as if he was a bed of nettles.

Bridie didn’t talk about anything else but the bump and had her ear to my stomach every chance she had. She had told it a thousand times how much she loved it and I swear it stretched itself with delight! I was getting to know its every movement and in my mind I always called it ‘her’. She had my heart in her tiny hand and I was glad. Someone needed to take care of the silly broken thing. I’d keep her away from John Johns; he didn’t strike me as a man who’d go wild for cooing into a pram.

I was getting used to not having electricity, not having TV, though I missed Bob Monkhouse and Hughie Green, even Val Doonican and his bog-awful jumpers. I really missed Coronation Street and Betty Turpin with her face like a bulldog. I had a sense of slipping into the past. Bridie banked the fire to keep it going for the morning pot of tea and the smell of turf clung to us all. I watched the sky with her for night to draw in. Carrying water in buckets now seemed normal even though I would never get used to braving the outside toilet which we only ever call the Tin House, to how cold it was, how full of things that crept and wriggled and bit, how bad the stench.